BEIJING – In the wake of days of extreme downpour fueled by Typhoon Saudel, the death toll from a devastating village mudslide in eastern China has climbed to three, with nine other residents still unaccounted for as of Sunday, local authorities confirmed.
The disaster struck a residential area of Suichuan County, located in China’s Jiangxi Province, in the early hours of Saturday. The fast-moving mudslide destroyed 12 residential homes, leaving local residents trapped and communities displaced. By Sunday, rescue teams recovered two additional bodies from the debris, according to China’s state-run national broadcaster CCTV. The third fatality linked to the typhoon in the region was first reported Saturday, and more than 5,300 Suichuan County residents have already been moved to emergency safe shelters to avoid further hazards from ongoing unstable weather.
Separately, CCTV has confirmed two more storm-related deaths in Hunan Province, a south-central Chinese region also impacted by Saudel’s heavy rain system. While the official report did not detail the exact circumstances of these two fatalities, it confirmed that the extreme rainfall has triggered widespread landslides and other secondary disasters across the province.
According to Chinese official news agency Xinhua, Typhoon Saudel made two separate landfalls along the coast of eastern Zhejiang Province on August 28, before strengthening and moving west to make a third landfall as a tropical storm in Fujian Province on September 3. Both Zhejiang and Fujian share borders with Jiangxi, putting the inland province directly in the path of the storm’s lingering rain bands.
In a separate development reported by Xinhua on Sunday, a landslide hit another Jiangxi village on Saturday, killing one person. The agency has not yet confirmed whether the landslide was directly triggered by rainfall from Typhoon Saudel, leaving ongoing investigation into that disaster’s root cause.